Project Scope

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world famous centre for botanical and mycological knowledge. With their two inspiring gardens at Kew in London and Wakehurst in Sussex, they are managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, an internationally important botanical research and education institution that employs 750 staff, and is a non-departmental public body.

Over the past 250 years Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has made innumerable contributions to increasing the understanding of plants and fungi with many benefits for humankind.

The Project.

Kew had undertaken a programme of works entitled “Information Technology and Telephony Modernisation” (ITTM).

This programme of work aimed to provide the necessary technology to enable Kew users to undertake their day-to-day jobs in a flexible way, as 78% of Kew staff are classed as mobile users whom travel the UK, Europe and worldwide in their employment.

As part of a Microsoft cloud strategy and to improve services and communications across the organisation, Kew selected to utilise Office 365 to assist in this transformation with Silversands moving existing on premise Exchange email to Exchange online and data (documents) from an existing T: Drive storage structure to SharePoint online.

Requirements and Issues

The need for a powerful, well established IT platform that covers our diverse business

Issues with multiple on-the-move users needing high availability required a high level of security

Maintaining up-to-date email with secure connectivity without the need for on premise servers

High levels of content and collaboration required across the entire organisation